interview: Richard Stengel INTERVIEWED BY JOHN CARLIN

This is a revealing and astute analysis of Mandela's life, character and leadership. Stengel collaborated with Mandela on his autobiography, taping approximately 75 hours of interviews and conducting over 30 others. He was with Mandela in South Africa for most of 1993, and during the election of 1994. Stengel is Senior Editor at Time Magazine and in addition to the Mandela book, is author of January Sun: One Day, Three Lives, a South African Town.

You spent quite a lot of time with Mandela in the Transkei. Were there any
reflections that you made about his Transkei existence, his tribal existence,
and how it helps illuminate our understanding of Mandela?

When I was with him in the Transkei, I used to get up with him very early to
take these incredibly long walks around the hillsides near his house in Qunu.
He is a very early riser, as he always tells you, and I am not a very early
riser. So he would always tease me about how tired I was and that maybe I had
to stay up all night in order to get ready for the walks that began at 5:30.
And this was the most wonderful part of his day.

He wouldn't have breakfast. He would leave his house at 5:30, surrounded by
these body guards, and it was quite cool in the morning in Transkei, and he
would pick a direction to go from his house there, that he remembered from when
he was a boy. He would follow those paths, and we would always come within
about a half an hour to some tiny little village. And this was the most remote
place on earth, and at 5:30 or 6:00 in the morning, he would knock on the doors
of these rondavels and say, "Good morning."

In some ways, he's a very impatient man, but in negotiations, in politics, he's enormously patient and part of that comes from his upbringing as a boy and seeing how the chief listened to what everyone had to say.

What was amazing to me, was that almost half the time, the people didn't
know who he was. They thought he was some visiting chief, maybe. I remember one
morning he got this lady up, woke her up, and she started bawling him out in
Xhosa. And then suddenly a little light went off in her head, and she said,
"Oh, you're the man in the newspaper." It really was extraordinary. People
didn't know who Nelson Mandela was, and he reveled in the fact that they didn't
know who he was.

This was his way of investigative reporting almost ... he wanted to know
how the people were living. And this was enormously instructive for him. At
the same time, it helped him keep this kind of chiefly role that he felt he had
over the area around his house, where he was born. It was enormously
instructive about him ... he'd give a speech somewhere at some little village.
No one spoke English there. He spoke in Xhosa. Nelson has a wonderful sense
of humor in English, but when he was speaking to the people in Xhosa, it was as
though there was a comedian up there. They were laughing. They were rolling in
the aisles just all the time, and I always thought there is a different
personality that he has speaking in Xhosa than speaking in English. He's much
more sort of proper in English. He's much more kind of 19th century English
gentleman in English, because of course that's the English he really learned
...

... You also saw him in action in Johannesburg, presumably during the time
of the negotiations with the government. Is there some way of making any
observations about the connection between what he brought from that chiefly,
tribal environment, that he then used or in some way expressed itself in the
modern environment?

Yes ... we talked a little bit about this in the book. He talked about when he
first went to Mqhekezweni, which was the chiefly area, after his father died,
where he was in effect adopted by the king. He talks about listening to the
elders there, and as a young man, as a boy, he really was quite shy. He was a
little bit self conscious, and he wasn't very talkative. He really listened.
One of the things that he absorbed there was this ability of the chief to
listen to what everybody had to say. The chief didn't speak until everybody had
had their say, and then he sort of weighed that.

One of the things that was reflected in the negotiations, is that Mandela
didn't weigh in with his opinion until everybody had spoken, and that gave him
a great deal of leverage. In some ways, he's a very impatient man, but in
negotiations, in politics, he's enormously patient and part of that comes from
his upbringing as a boy and seeing how the chief listened to what everyone had
to say. In negotiations ... that gave him some leverage, gave him some power,
because his opinion remained a mystery until the last. It seemed more forceful
because he had held it in abeyance until then.

His regal quality, this self control that you see in him, are there any
connections there with the chiefly role--how the chief is expected to behave?

When I first started working with Mandela on the book, people around him would
always say to me, "You must remember that he was groomed to be chief." What I
discovered is that that was a tiny bit of a misnomer. His father was an
appointed chief. He wasn't a blood chief. In fact, Nelson wouldn't have
become a chief, because he wasn't in a direct line of succession, because his
mother was the wrong wife for the succession. So he wasn't really a chief in
the way that people think, but he was from a family that would be a kind of
aristocratic, upper-middle-class family. And when he moved to the king's
village, he was able to observe this.

But there was a kind of natural "aristocratic-ness" about him, a kind of
natural princeliness, and part of that jarred with him when he saw real
royalty, and he observed them. He observed the way they walk, the way they
carry themselves, what they dressed like, what they wore. Even his fabulous
posture comes from as a little boy observing the way the king stood. In a way,
he was a natural king ...

I wonder if one could say that it was because he knew he wasn't entirely
of that lineage, that he perhaps strained that much harder. It was a fairly
natural human instinct to be all the more regal in his bearing and so forth ...
would that be a valid thing to say?

I think that is a valid thing to say. He, what is that French expression
[plus royaliste que le roi]--more royal than the king, more kingly than
the king. He epitomized that a little bit himself, because he thought, "I can
be an amalgam of this. I have some royal blood and I can be more kingly than
the king in just the way that I am."

And he saw this and it appealed to him in a way. In fact, one of the things
that happened when he went to Johannesburg for the first time after being
treated with great deference where he grew up--it bothered him. It put a chip
on his shoulder. He hates indignity of any kind and suddenly he is confronted
with indignity everywhere he went. It gave him a kind of ... some poets have a
lover's quarrel with the world. It gave him a quarrel with the world, with the
way the world was in South Africa, with apartheid, because it treated him with
indignity at every turn. He loathed that; it really rubbed something wrong
inside of him.

One thing that we have tried to identify is the motor that drove him through
his life's quest. The spur. To some degree, would that be part of the
answer--this sense of his own dignity having been offended and wanting to put
that to rights?

I think that's right. I have often thought to myself, and having been with him
in so many private moments and seen what he's like in these intimate moments,
had he grown up in a utopia, not that any of us do, he would have been quite
happy to be a small town lawyer, and have a family and farm, maybe. There was
no burning ambition in him to be a great leader, unless it was necessary for
him to become a great leader ...

What made him a great man was the fact that his dignity was offended. That when
he went out into the larger world, it didn't jibe with his own conception of
himself, and he realized, "If I feel so deeply spurned, and everything is so
deeply unfair to me, think how it must be for all these other people, who are
not as able to withstand it as I am." That was the motor, that was the
trigger. Because I don't think he is a naturally reflective or introspective
man ...

... It is a feeling of responsibility that you are describing there, which
perhaps brings us back to the idea of the chief of the aristocracy, being
responsible for his people. Maybe that kicked in at that point.

One never knows what drives people to do this sort of thing. I mean one of the
things that he even recalls, and he said to me that it was a terrible moment in
his young adult life, when he had these small children and when they were in
Soweto, and he would leave every night or be gone for long periods of time.
They'd go, "Daddy why aren't you here. I miss you. I am lonely." He'd have to
say these terrible tragic words which were, "Well, there are other children out
there, and they are lonely and sad, and they don't have their father either,
and I have to think of them."

What is it that makes a man say that to his child, as opposed to another person
who says, "I can't leave my child?" And what drove him to feel that? ... well,
it's a little bit what we were talking about in terms of his
amour-propre -- of his dignity being offended. But it was a slow, slow
process. It took a long time for him to move from a person who himself felt
offended, to a person who is going to take up the cudgels for everyone else who
feels offended.

... What was it that Walter Sisulu saw in Mandela? I believe you talked to
Sisulu about it.

Well, first, it just reminded me of one thing that Nelson said when he talked
about meeting Walter. It was always interesting to hear him describe meetings
with people that he first met when he was a young man in Johannesburg. One of
the things that impressed him about Walter Sisulu, and it always impressed him
as a young man was ... [that] Walter's English was very good. He was always
impressed when a black man spoke proper English ... What impressed him about
Walter, among other things, was the fact that he was a businessman, that he
seemed to be generating income, he spoke English. He could survive in that
world that Nelson was wondering whether he could survive in, and wanted to
survive in.

When I talked to Walter about what he saw in Nelson, Walter is such a lovely
human being, and he almost had this vision that when Nelson Mandela walked into
his office, and Walter Sisulu ... he's stocky, but he's quite a small man. And
when Nelson Mandela, this young, strapping, budding attorney, with shoulders as
wide as an air force carrier, and this handsome face, and this great posture
... he thought, "Here is a king, but here is also a potential leader."

What Walter told me that we could never use in the book, and obviously this
was a little bit after the fact, but what he realized as he got to know Nelson,
was, "Here is our natural mass leader. I am a leader. I am a short man. I have
a soft voice. I am shy. There are other people like me, who are in the ANC and
dedicated. I cannot stand in front of a roomful of people and get them excited.
This man, this boxer, with a beautiful smile, who is so winning--he is our mass
leader. We need to be a mass organization." That was their aspiration. So they
needed someone who could take them to the promised land of being a mass
organization. Nelson Mandela.

One word that we have heard from a number of people who are close to Mandela
and Walter Sisulu ... to describe their relationship, was that Walter "groomed"
Nelson.

I don't know how true it is. We like those kind of "My Fair Lady" stories,
where Dr. Dolittle takes the urchin girl and turns her into a lady, and I am
not so sure that Walter saw that far ahead of the road. He saw, as I
was saying, that Nelson was a natural mass leader, but I don't think he had it
all plotted out.

I think that it's a two-way street. Nelson watched Walter and saw the way
Walter operated and the fact that Walter was very calm. On the island they
called Walter, "Allah" because he was so wise and calm, and at an early age
Nelson saw this is one way to be as a leader. He wasn't that way because he was
volatile at this stage, but at least he saw that with Walter. It may look,
from hindsight, that maybe Walter was grooming him to be like he was. But in
fact, Nelson was looking at Walter and saying, "This is one way for a leader to
be and I will factor this into my persona."

You talked about his volatility. What examples of his volatility in those
early days, let's say pre-Rivonia Trial, stand out in your mind?

He was an Africanist as he became radicalized. He wasn't a natural
revolutionary--whatever that is. He wasn't at all. In a way, he's a natural
status quo person. So when that person does become a revolutionary, he becomes
an extremist almost. He had to justify to himself almost psychologically, and
so he's an emotional person.

There were times when he broke up meetings in the early days, when he was a
member of the ANC Youth League, and when Indians wanted to become members of
the ANC Youth League. There was a time that he talks about where he tossed some
people off the stage. He used to get up at rallies and give these kind of fiery
speeches ... so different than the Nelson Mandela we see today. But he was
bursting with this kind of emotion. He didn't know what to do with it, and this
was an outlet for him. The kind of volatility and extremism of the ANC Youth
League appealed to him, because he was that kid in the gang who wanted to do
the most daring thing. He wasn't the person sitting in the back seat who said,
"No, no, let's not push the car over 60 miles an hour." He was gunning the
engine, and that's the way he was in those days.

What would be a criticism of him in those days? That he was possibly
dangerously reckless for the purposes that he was actually espousing? Would
that be too unfair?

Part of it is the sort of recklessness of youth in general. I don't think he
was ever reckless in the sense that he really took terrible chances and
terrible risks. He took some for himself. But I don't think he ever did it in
terms of what might jeopardize the movement, and no matter how emotional he
was, or how volatile, he still retained that incredible respect for his elders
and for chiefly people. I mean even when he went to see Chief Luthuli, to
remonstrate with the then head of the ANC who had renounced violence, he was
utterly respectful. He would never in a million years say something to Chief
Luthuli that the chief might find offensive, even though he was this hot-headed
young man of the ANC Youth League. He was a very polite young man, at the same
time, a hot-head.

How do you interpret his decision to go for armed struggle? It's one thing
being a fiery rhetorician, another thing is starting MK.

The thing about Mandela is that he never really was a rhetorician, he
was never really an intellectual. He was, most of all, a pragmatist. Even as a
young man he was a pragmatist. Now we certainly see him as a pragmatist ...
for all of the kind of high flown, highfalutin intellectual revolutionary talk
that he engaged in, he was most of all a pragmatist. Basically, he was
thinking, "Well, how can we win? How can we topple the regime?" He embraced
nonviolence when nonviolence seemed like the practical way to go about it. But
after kicking against the bricks, and knocking your head against the wall for a
long time, he just realized from a practical standpoint, it wasn't going to
work.

He has no love of violence, as he would say many times. He tells that lovely
story when he was at the farmhouse in Rivonia, and he was trying to teach
himself how to shoot a gun. He had never shot a gun before. And here was the
head of Umkhonto we Sizwe, who didn't even know how to hold a gun, and he had
this BB gun and he shot a sparrow on the tree in the farmhouse. It died, and he
was stricken. He felt miserable. He thought to himself, "Yes, there is some
special providence in the fall of a sparrow," and he felt ghastly about it. He
is the guy who in prison ... if there was an insect in his cell, he would pick
it up and carry it out and put it outside. So there was nothing about him that
liked violence. He just saw it as the most expedient way of toppling the
government.

A number of people have told us that in those early days ... a 20-year
period, from his arrival in Johannesburg to Rivonia ... that he was initially a
bit of a country bumpkin, "rustic-ish" is one of the words that we hear.
"Country-ish," said one lady in Soweto. Others have told us that, actually, he
was just one helluva dandy. Where do you fall on this or was it in fact an
evolution from one to the other? ...

One of the things I have discovered about Nelson Mandela is that all statements
about him worked both ways. Every positive statement has its negative, every
negative statement has its positive. He was a country bumpkin and he was a
dandy. He tells these lovely stories about when he first came to Johannesburg
and he was incredibly naive ... he had one pair of trousers, and he just kept
getting it patched and patched and patched. He was just so embarrassed to
actually talk to a girl that he might be attracted to, because he was wearing
these horrible hand-me-down clothes.

He tells that lovely story about ordering a piece of meat for the first time in
a butcher, which he had never done before, and bringing it home to this little
shanty that he was staying in and asking the young girl there to cook it. And
she looked at it and laughed, and he said, "Why are you laughing?" She
said, "It already is cooked." He didn't know you could even buy cooked meat
before. So he was a country bumpkin. But one of the things that happened to him
in the city, in the same way that happened to him in the royal village, is in
the royal village he looked at the king and realized this is who I empathize
with. He looked at the way men of the world dressed and he thought, "Ah, that's
the way I want to be."

There is that lovely picture of him just when he first came to Johannesburg and
he is wearing this beautiful double-breasted peaked lapel suit that looked like
it was handmade for him, and probably was. George Bizos, his long time lawyer
tells a lovely story about seeing Nelson Mandela for the first time in this
little Indian tailor shop, that he, George, used to go to, getting fitted for a
suit. He said, "I had never seen a black man in there before, much less being
fitted for a suit." Of course, he looked like a model for these suits. So he
became a bit of a dandy. He's a vain man. He knows he's a handsome man. He
knows the image that he cuts. He likes fine things. He's incredibly neat about
his things, and cares for them. That was the dandy side of him ...

He is a flatterer, isn't he? It's a technique that he has. On one
level it is probably entirely natural, but on the other hand he clearly uses it
as a method of disarming...

Well, again, it's like everything is both ways with him. It's genuine and it's
calculated. So that I'd seen him do things where he'd run into a journalist
that he hadn't seen in a long time, and he'd run up to him and say, "Joe,
remember me?" and there was something honest about it. He has this combination
of great self assurance and some insecurity, which comes from when he was a
little boy and when he first went to Johannesburg. So these two things work
together. He knows how blandishments ... because in fact he is incredibly
susceptible to flattery and compliments himself. It's a kind of unerring
missile into him, to flatter him, because it confirms in a way his sense of
self-esteem. So he's a master of using it and he is also disarmed by it at the
same time.

You say that he has this insecurity. Can you give any other examples to
illustrate that point?

I think he, in a strange way, is a kind of hero worshipper ... he even talked
about as a small boy, when he was in Qunu, and I remember he told me a story
once when we were walking in the hills around the town, and he said this is
where the white shop was. And he told a story about when he had come there one
day to buy something for his father, and he said to me, "Oh, the white man, the
white shopkeeper was like a god to me." Can you imagine hearing Nelson Mandela
say that some poor white shopkeeper in the Transkei was like a god to him? But
he was being genuine. The insecurity comes from those days. And no one ... not
even a god, can not have insecurity raised in that circumstance, where you are
automatically treated as something lower than low. So his curious mixture of
self-esteem and self-confidence is balanced by some insecurity.

When he first came to the U.S. ... I remember he would come back and say to me,
"Richard, I met Elizabeth Taylor today. Can you imagine? I was talking to
Elizabeth Taylor." I remember when he met Sophia Loren and he said, "Ooh, we
used to watch her movies on Robben Island, and there I was, talking to Sophia
Loren." He was awed. And doubtless she was awed with him, but it's a lovely,
lovely quality. It's a boyish quality that he's never ever lost ... even now.
When he meets Bill Clinton, he adores meeting the president of the United
States. He is in awe. It's still that little boy from the Transkei at some
level saying, "I am talking to the president of the United States."

Something else that I have seen in him is an awe of intellectuals, of
professors ... Is that something that you have noticed?

It's a function of what we were talking about a little bit in terms of
flattery, as well. He's very aware that academics are very flattered to be
considered important by men of the world like him. So he does do that. At the
same time, he thinks these people have a genuine achievement--they have
genuinely done something. He was not an intellectual, although he could pass as
one, and certainly he's studied quite a lot, but he saw them as having some
genuine achievement in the world that he respected. But he also has a kind of
disdain a little bit for intellectuals. Men of the ANC often did, that they
were not men of action and we are men of action.

Let's move onto the Black Pimpernel phase. One thing that is emerging from
what you are saying ... sort of Mandela playing roles, watching and then
imitating ... One thing we have heard from people is that there was a certain
self conscious modeling on the Chè Guevera/Castro myths. Any thoughts on
how that black pimpernel persona came about?

Speaking of acting, I have often thought that there are a lot of similarities
between Nelson Mandela and Ronald Reagan. I am reminded of the time that Reagan
was asked, maybe even when he was running for president, "How can the president
be an actor?" And Reagan replied quite sensibly, "How can the president not be
an actor?"

Nelson Mandela as a leader realized the potency of acting, what was important
about acting. He's realized it as a boy, in a way. You inhabit a role and you
become that thing. And that worked with him in so many ways. So I think he is a
fabulous actor, and he realized the role of how to play the role of statesman.
How to be contained, when to smile, when not to smile. I mean, he is a dreadful
public speaker, isn't he? He speaks so poorly. Yet, he is this charismatic
leader. He doesn't have to even open his mouth. His smile and the way he
carried himself is what represents him at a leader, almost not what he says at
all.

If we look at when he became the Black Pimpernel--he immersed himself in the
literature. And remember, the ANC at that time was a leftist organization; it
was the era of the uprising against imperialism. He read Castro and Chè
Guevera. In fact, there are a lot of parallels between him and Fidel Castro.
Both big men, both lawyers, both men from an aristocratic sort of background
who had a kind of lover's quarrel with the world, and became revolutionaries.
That became the model for him of how to go underground. He grew that scraggly
beard. This was a man who loved to shave. Who loves to shave now. He grew that
beard and he became so devoted to it--he loved it. He didn't even want to shave
it off when he was captured. He loved the idea, he loved the uniforms of being
underground. He tells these lovely stories of ... the way he hid himself
underground, is that he would often be the chauffeur for a white member of the
ANC.

He talks quite lovingly about the '50s black chauffeur's uniform--this kind of
one piece overall thing. He used to fold it at night, and put it on in the
morning. He loved playing this part. It was so different from any part that
he had ever played before. And there is a lovely mischievous side to Nelson
Mandela. In a strange way, when he was underground, he was playing cowboys and
Indians ... He liked that aspect of it. The little bit of recklessness in him
was piqued by this--the close calls, the fact that he would be there in his
uniform, in his beard, next to a police station, and they wouldn't know who he
was. He was a little bit tickled by that, and that also is what created the
image of the Black Pimpernel.

... His celebrated [trip] ... [when] he went over the border. What stands
out in that story that you remember which made an impact on you?

His trip was important, particularly in one sense, which is that he went to
black Africa for the first time, and he was in countries that were all African.
The president was African, the supreme court was African, the taxi drivers were
African. He tells this wonderful story of when he was first flying ... and he
was alarmed to see that the pilots were black. He had never seen a black pilot
before, and he grew up in South Africa ... But what happened was, when he was
in Africa, this was a kind of Utopia for him. This was the world that he was
trying to create in South Africa, and it spoke to his self-esteem. It spoke to
his sense of himself. He was treated almost like royalty wherever he went.
He thought, "This is the way the world should be. This is my model." I mean it
might not have been as efficient as South Africa, and there might not have been
hot and cold running water in different places, but he felt at home, that he
had come home in a way that he'd never been before.

What does he say about his visit to London ... that having been a bit of an
eye opener too, with all these white folks treating him with some modicum of
respect.

Well, I have always thought that he is an Anglophile, and in a way it's hard
not to be ... when I was writing about his development--when he was in those
prep schools--and I went back and looked at some of the text books that they
had. He was reading Macaulay for history when he was a boy. Those are 19th
century English text books. He became imbued with Englishness and English
language. He told that lovely story to me about the headmaster who said he was
descended from the great Duke of Marlborough, and this impressed Nelson. He
talked about how, when he was at school and it was during the bombings in
London in World War II, they used to listen to the radio of Winston Churchill's
speeches, and he said he was mesmerized. This touched him somewhere, because
they were English colonialists.

When he first went to London, even back then, he loved seeing the Houses of
Parliament and Big Ben and touring around. This was the great world to him.
England was the place ... plus there were these English politicians and
English leaders who were treating him as a visiting diplomat, as it were. He
saw that when he came to London, this place that was the center of the
world for him in a way, he was treated as a great man ... as the person who had
held the future of Africa in his hand. And he was frankly flattered by it, and
he realized this is the way the world should be in my country too.

... Something that you mentioned before ... that in another life Mandela
would have been chairman of an English 19th century gentlemen's club.

Yes.

Talk to me about that side, that English gentleman persona.

Yes, someone once said about him that he is a combination of an African
aristocrat and an English gentleman. I think the English gentleman was the
beau idéal for him that he had learned as a child, that he had
learned from school, and in a strange way because he lived in this bifurcated
world--a black world and a white world. In the white world, he was an English
gentleman. That was the way to be. That was the best way for an African to be.

In the African world, he was a chief, which isn't that different than
being an English gentleman, but you wear a different costume, you speak in a
different way and so his Englishness comes from his sense of this is the way a
man of the world, in the wider world, in the white world, has to behave. And he
is a perfect gentleman.

... on the other hand, he goes to Algeria and does more arms training ...
What did he tell you about Algeria, where he actually did get a bit of training
...

Well, as I recall now ... him talking about Algeria. He went through a kind of
a basic training camp there with a kind of guerrilla leader. They weren't
Algerians. I guess they were maybe French, and it was his first time saying to
himself, "Ah, this is what the military life is like. This is what a military
man is like. This is the chain of command." Which is something that became very
important to him, which he hadn't really known about, but in a way it did
dovetail with the chiefly chain of command. He learned a little bit about the
theory of being underground, being a revolutionary. He talked a little bit
about what he learned from what had been written about in the Anglo-Boer War,
and how the Boers basically made headaches for the British, in being
underground, and that was what they were trying to copy ...

The Rivonia Trial. You must have talked at some length to him about that.
Did he believe that he actually was going to die, and if so, did he ever give
any sense, in his theatrical way, perhaps, of how he might actually confront
death? ...

One of the things that separates Mandela from other people, and even from the
other Rivonia trialists, is that he's an optimist. He's a cockeyed optimist.
It's like that Reagan story ... Reagan used to tell of the little boy on
Christmas morning who came down and there was a huge pile of manure under the
Christmas tree, and he started digging in it, and the mother said, "What are
you doing?" And he says, "Well there must be a pony in here somewhere." I mean
that's Nelson Mandela--"There must be a pony in here somewhere."

... What happened to him on Robben island, in a way, is that he began to see things in the round, in three dimension. He began to see things that it was both ways. Nobody is all good or all evil. Nobody operates purely out of selfish motives, or purely out of unselfish motives. It gave him a more rounded view of humanity and life.

He never ever really thought that they might be executed. And the little bit of
recklessness he used in the final paragraph of the speech, was in part because
he thought, "I am thumbing my nose at you. I know you are not going to kill me.
I'm indestructible." The reasons that other people wanted him to modulate it,
was because they were thinking, "No man, you are not indestructible. They'll
hang you like a dog and not think twice about it." But I think that he didn't
really ever think that it was going to happen to him.

... Had he been executed, contrary to his naive optimism, what do you think
the assessment of him would have been?

Had Nelson Mandela gone to the gallows, as he could easily have, he would be
more or less a footnote in ANC history. This man of great potential, a
firebrand, passionate advocate who started Umkhonto we Sizwe, the army, and he
would be remembered for that. He might even be remembered as a military man,
strangely, rather than as a man of peace. Because his career in a strange was,
even when he went to prison in '43, it was still the beginning of his life in a
way. He still hadn't really matured--a word that he loves to use. I think
historians would look at him as a footnote, as a firebrand.

You use the word mature. Is that because during those 27 years in prison, he
did indeed mature, and he emerged a different man? ... If you agree with that
premise, that he grew--in what sense did he do so most obviously?

Well, that reminds me of an anecdote which is a kind of long windup to
answering this question. I remember once when we were walking in the Transkei,
and I used to try to do sort of double duty and ask him questions while we were
walking, even though he didn't like it. He just wanted to be able to tell
stories, and not really work on the book at all. I don't really remember what
the question was, [but] I said, "Madiba, is the reason A or is the reason B?"
And he looked at me like I'd asked the silliest question in the world and he
said, "Richard, why not both?"

There were so many times when I was talking to him and interviewing him,
and in effect his answer was, "both." It's never just one reason, or this or
that reason. It's always some combination, and what happened to him on the
island, in a way, is that he began to see things in the round, in three
dimension. He began to see things that it was both ways. Nobody is all good or
all evil. Nobody operates purely out of selfish motives, or purely out of
unselfish motives. It gave him a more rounded view of humanity and life. That's
what maturity is. That, in fact, in some ways, is his maturity. That he sees
things from both sides, and that really happened, for all kinds of reasons, on
the island. The man, that firebrand as a young man, didn't see things in the
round at all. The man who walked out of prison, who says, "I came out mature,"
saw things from both sides.

... He goes into prison and the world became, literally, constricted. He
acquires a sense of limitation, that an act of will cannot translate into a
reality. And that sense of limitation must have been part of the process of
acquiring this wisdom.

Yes. The whole point, it seemed to me, of the South African prison system and
Robben Island, in particular, was to drill into the head of the prisoners, that
your world is more constricted now than it has ever been before. When you think
about it, a black man growing up in South Africa in the '20s and '30s and '40s,
his world is pretty darn constricted as it is, compared to what a human beings
life should be. Suddenly, it becomes even more restricted. He tells those
stories about how they had to wear short pants when they first came to the
island. He hated that. He hated it in particular--why? It's an indignity. I am
a boy wearing short pants. I mean anything that smacked of something that was
an indignity really spoke to him. So his world became constricted, and, in a
way, that allowed him to become bigger, because it gave him self-control. He
learned self-control in that tiny little cell.

I remember when I first went to Robben Island, and I had been working with him
for some months, and he is a big man in every way. When one of the warders took
me to his cell, and opened the door, I gasped when I saw it. There wasn't room
for a human being much less Nelson Mandela, this outsized human being. In a
strange way that cell modeled him. He learned to live within that cell. He is
an incredibly neat man. You often see these people who spent their entire life
in the military--they're incredibly neat. A man who spends his adult life in
prison often becomes incredibly neat. And he is. When he goes on a trip, I
remember ... we'd be in the house, and he'd pull out a box of Kleenex. Right.
And he'd take the tissue out of the box. Then he'd lay it on the table and then
he'd fold it, like this, in fours and he'd pat it down. Then he'd take another
one, and he'd fold it in fours and pat it down. He'd do four or five that way
and then he'd put it in his pocket. It took 15 minutes. So, so precise...

I remember once we were going to do an interview and it was in the afternoon,
and he gets tired in the afternoon. He was having his nap, and he had this
lovely housekeeper ... and she said, "Just go upstairs, Richard." ... I came
into his bedroom, and he was having his afternoon nap. He had this great
king-size bed. But there he was, in one tiny corner of it ... I'm sure that
horrible mattress that he had on Robben Island. The whole rest of the bed was
pristine. Completely made, and he was just in this little portion of the bed
lying there like this. It was very poignant. He gets out of a bed, and it's
made. Because he'll never leave a bed and not make it. But seeing him there
like that was just extraordinary. That's the constriction of the world that he
had to learn to live in.

I remember when we would do our interviews ... I used a microphone like this,
and he has no hand for gadgets or mechanical things for all kinds of good
reasons. Plus his hands are so blunt, [they] couldn't even do anything this
small. But I remember when he would ask me to put it on him, and I would put it
on him every morning or every day. And he would [stand] stock still and not
move. Not even be aware that I was so close in there. Because here is a man who
didn't even have control of his own body for all these years. That people were
doing things to [him]--putting his shirt on, taking his shirt off, being in a
space, ordering him. He learned to be still and be contained and control
himself. It really was extraordinary. I was always in awe that he would be like
this and would pin this little microphone on. He would just go into kind of
this Zen state. I just assumed that must have come from the prison
experience. That he learned physical self-control too, which he hadn't had
before.

I remember asking him about sexuality in prison. And talking to Nelson Mandela
and asking him intimate things and personal things--it's really not an easy
thing to do ... But I remember asking him about sexuality in prison and sort of
gearing up enough courage to do so. He is so unsqueamish. You can't ask a
single question to him that he would be squeamish about. This is a man who went
to the bathroom for ... 25 years in front of everybody he knew. He had no
privacy ... nothing that he did from washing under his arms, that he could ever
do in any kind of privacy. He is not the least bit squeamish. So my
squeamishness was ridiculous.

So I asked him about his sexuality in prison, and he had this beautiful simple
answer ... he said, "We had no avenue of sexual self-expression in prison."
Period. Full stop. The perfect and beautiful answer to an incredibly
complicated intimate question. But think of the incredible turmoil that one had
to get through to get to that point, and give an answer like that. That
explains a lot of his self-control--that he got to that point. So that's what
molded him. Prison was the crucible that molded his character. That gave him
patience, that gave him the ability to see things in the round, that gave him
the ability to deal with the enemy, because he was living on intimate terms
with the enemy, in a way that he never had before. Because the guards
controlled his life and they were intimate inhabitants in the same rats nest.
So he had to learn to live with those people.

He learned Afrikaans in prison. This wonderful, precise, very scholarly
Afrikaans. He would often, when telling me a story about prison, say something
in Afrikaans, a language unfortunately which I don't speak, and then he would
take my pad and he'd painstakingly write it out in his big capital letter
print. I was looking at my notes before, and this one time when they used the
word for "stomach" saying to one of the prisoners, "You will lose that big
stomach when you are in here." They used the Afrikaans word for stomach that
applies to an animal, not a man. And he was very precise in the way he spelled
it out for me, and explained the distinction between the word you use for
stomach for a man, and stomach for an animal. That was the way he learned
Afrikaans. He wanted to make sure that he understood the language of the enemy.
That he could speak it.